


the long happy road

by bellepeppertronix



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-03
Updated: 2014-02-06
Packaged: 2017-12-22 06:56:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/910258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellepeppertronix/pseuds/bellepeppertronix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Slices of life from the Pentecost-Hansen household.</p>
<p>(Alternate Universe; Stacker and Hercules are married, Chuck and Mako are teenagers. These are a series of short-ish ficlets, loosely connected and not in chronological order.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Family Dinner Night

**Author's Note:**

> I am writing these because I feel like there aren't enough people carrying a torch for the Stacker/Herc ship. Also because I feel like Chuck and Mako needed to have actual adolescences. I hope you enjoy them!

The pizza is ruined. That much Herc is sure of.  
He's just...not sure _how_.  
He followed the directions...the damn thing came frozen in a box, for Christ's sake! What could possibly--  
The back door bangs open, voices spilling in.  
"Dad! We're back!"  
And he wants to curse the heavens. The walking stomach and the grazing typhoon are home.  
The two in question come into the kitchen, Chuck dragging his backpack and Mako already glancing around, both looking for snacks. He can see she has ink dried in uneven splotches all the way from her fingertips to her forearms. Chuck has scrapes all over his knuckles, and he starts to ask him how he got them when Chuck speaks first.  
"What's _that_?" Chuck asks, and pulls a face at the charcoat-rimmed bread disk that _might_ have passed for a pizza, about one hour and twenty degrees ago.  
"It's a pizza," Herc says gruffly.  
"Oh," Mako says. She looks at him, her face carefully blank, and then a guilty twitch escapes across her features.  
She turns and opens the refrigerator.  
Chuck is much more blunt.  
"Why didn't you just let Stacker do it? He'd have made it from scratch, with the nice sauce."  
"Because," Herc says, one hand flat on the countertop and the other on his hip, and holy _hell_ , he remembers that his own father used to stand like this, when he lectured he and his brothers about Why Things Were The Way They Were.  
"Because...what, Dad?" Chuck says.  
Mako pulls an oblong bamboo tub out of the fridge--steamed white rice, he sees, when she lifts the bamboo lid--and hands it to Chuck.  
"Because," Herc continues, feeling ridiculous, "Stacker is in England for some very important meetings, you both know that."  
"Yeah," Chuck says, "But if you'd have asked him before he'd left, he could've made stuff and frozen it for all of us."  
Herc can't even argue, his son's logic is so flawless. He _wants_ to, though, but he knows his cooking is indefensible.  
Stacker would have given him a peck on the cheek and helpfully said, "You probably ought to have checked the box to see if it needed Fahrenheit or Celsius before popping it in the oven, love."  
He glares down at the miserable failure that is his pizza, and looks back up to see his daughter and son conspiratorially stuffing the rice into a large plastic bowl.  
"Not the burnt ones from the bottom!" Mako is scolding.  
Chuck makes a face at her.  
"'Not the burns ones!'" he says, mimicking her accent. "I'm _starving_! What does it matter?"  
She does not reply. She glares at him a moment, then swats him with the rice spatula.  
He sinks his fingers into her hair and wriggles his fingers until her hair looks like a rat's-nest and she squeals and pulls away.  
Herc sighs and resigns himself to eating rice with hair in it.  
He leaves the kitchen, leaves the pair of now-arguing teenagers, and goes back upstairs to sit on Stacker's side of the bed and privately mope, and wish for a phone call. 

He passes by Mako's door on the way to their room, without glancing in.  
He knows what it looks like.  
All her furniture is black. She painted the walls electric blue--the same color as the tips in her hair--but the blue is barely visible, because her walls are so covered with papers. Elaborate drawings and blueprints are pinned all over the walls of Mako's room, vying for space with anime posters of various mecha.  
She designs _everything_ \--cases for phones and laptops; aircrafts of varyingly probable designs; the inescapable giant robots. Most of them have cute, if bizarre, names.  
He wonders, privately, if he should have bought her that Escaflowne box set, all those years ago, when she was a sad eleven-year-old who only knew three sentences in English. The most heartbreaking had been, "Where is Stacker?"  
He wishes he had someone to pose the question to, now.  
The door to Chuck's room is wide open, brick-red walls bare except for the handful of vintage 'Join the Navy!' posters he'd begged off Stacker.  
His bed is piled with clothes, the neck of a guitar sticking sadly out of the jumble. He has no idea how one young man can own _that_ many gray t-shirts, but, well.  
A chubby bulldog puppy is sitting in the doorway, looking fuddled. Herc can see that Chuck has smuggled the doggie-bed underneath his own bed again, from where it's supposed to be, downstairs in the kitchen nook by the back door.  
"Hiya, Max," Herc says, and leans down to scratch--or, well, gently wobble the chubb folds--on the puppy's back. "Chuck's downstairs. You wanna go say hi? Go find Chuck, Max! Find Chuck!"  
And the dog takes off, or tries to. Bulldogs not being the most elegant of animals, but damn if he (and Chuck, and Stacker, and Mako, and everyone, actually including the neighbors) doesn't love that puppy.

Stacker and Mako are the ones who'd decorated the entire place, which had been an exercise in sad beigeness before they'd come into their lives.  
He's grateful, he really is, but part of him really, honestly wishes that Stacker's tastes weren't quite so...expensive. Herc had broken a vase once and just _stood_ there, feeling like some ginger behemoth, certain the vase was either an heirloom from Stacker's travels in Japan or some hopelessly expensive modern-art piece he'd gotten from one of his friends.  
Mako is the one who pics up the pieces, who tells him it's from IKEA, and who says, with a knowing look in her eyes, that it is the third one they've had, and Stacker himself was the one who broke the first one.  
Their bedroom is in muted yellows and greens, amber-colored walls, olive-colored curtains to match the green coverlet on the bed and the green armchairs he mostly throws his clothes over as he is getting dressed in the morning.

He comes downstairs two hours later to find the rice re-steamed in its bamboo crock, and pot of curry simmering on the stove.  
Mako is sitting at the kitchen table, surrounded by piles of textbooks.  
When he comes up behind her, she forgets to even pretend to be guilty. She does not hide the doodled--what is that, he wonders, an alien Gundam?--that she has been working on, instead of her geography homework.  
But she smiles beatifically up at him, and shuffles it into a pile of (meticulously-labeled, with dense, neat handwriting tracking all over the paper) armor diagrams that is thicker than the stack of homework pages she's finished.  
He raises his eyebrows and clears his throat.  
"Finish your homework?"  
"No, but I am working on it."  
"Hm." he says. He tries to sound helpful but feels like he comes across as condescending. He almost starts to _apologize_ , but Mako speaks first.  
"Did you get anything to eat for dinner?"  
"Not yet," he says, "But everything smells great."  
He at least has the sense not to ask what they did with the pizza.  
He tries to come up with something else to say, but just pats her shoulder awkwardly as he walks around the corner and into the living room.  
He's terrible at imitating Stacker and knows it, knows it in his bones the second he hears the telltale rustle of paper the second his back is turned.  
Chuck is in the living room, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the couch, alternately rubbing Max's belly and playing with his ears or his floppy neck-skin. Max is wriggling and happily whining.  
An algebra textbook, jammed full of loose pages of lined paper between its own pages, and chocked open with a pencil, is on the couch behind his head.  
"Finish your homework?"  
"Yeah."  
"What are you watching?"  
"Dunno." Chuck doesn't look up from Max; he is making kissy-faces at the puppy, who rolls over and clambers into his lap, licking at his chin.  
On the telly (which is muted) there is a car chase scene going on, Bruce Willis apparently trying to run a green man and his blue-haired accomplice off the road.  
Herc realizes he has no idea what he is doing, and retreats back into the kitchen.  
The curry is good--Chuck must have made it, he thinks, because Mako's is always just this shy of being legally classifiable as demolitions-grade explosive material--and he gets himself a bowl of that and the rice.  
And does _exactly_ what he always tells them not to do. He sneaks upstairs with his dinner, and sits on Stacker's side of the bed, eating and watching reruns of classic movies where nothing really bad ever happens.


	2. Sometimes You Get a Good Feeling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When, how, and why Chuck gets Max.

"He doesn't need a hug _or_ a kick in the ass, Herc," Stacker says. He is rubbing his neck and shoulders dry with a thick butter-colored towel, and he stops, meaningfully, and nudges Herc's knee with his shin.  
"He needs something to strive for--something to _do_. Give him a project, something like that." Stacker is leaning over the counter and inspecting his chin.  
Herc is sitting on the closed toilet, still in his pajamas, yawning. He pulls out one of the bathroom drawers and hands Stacker his electric razor, without being asked.  
"Tried all that. He spends more time posing and scowling with the guitar than he does playing it," Herc mumbles.  
"He does not," Stacker says. "He stops and scowls whenever he catches you spying on him."  
"But I don't _spy_ on him, he just--he never _talks_ to me!" Herc says, gesturing, his hands open.  
Stacker sighs and chuckles a little, the razor buzzing over his chin.  
Herc wipes a hand over his own cheeks and considers shaving, himself, before the razor goes silent and Stacker's hand slides gently after his own, turning his face up to look at him.  
"And I don't even know what I _did_ ," Herc confesses.  
Stacker's smile is gentle. He doesn't say anything, doesn't admonish Herc, just rubs his face until Herc grunts in pleasure and tilts his head back.  
Stacker hums softly and scratches the stubble under his chin.  
In the end, Stacker is the one who comes up with something for Chuck.

"It's my turn!" Chuck says.  
Mako rolls her eyes. "It was your turn for the last ten minues. It's _my_ turn right now."  
"Whatever! It's _my_ birthday. And time doesn't count! It's the number of songs you get!"  
"Since _when_?" Mako asks.  
"We've got to get them headphones," Stacker mumbles, to Herc, and Herc smirks and shrugs.  
"You were the one who said you didn't want to encourage hearing loss." Herc says.  
"I regret that--more and more--with each passing day," Stacker says, with difficulty, over the rising argument in the back seat.  
Herc is the one who cranes his head around to shout at them, "Hey! You two better calm down, or I'll just take the audio-in cable and we'll all listen to--"  
"NO! NO NO!"  
"WE'LL--WE'RE SORRY!"  
And then Stacker laughs outright.  
They stop arguing, and dutifully take turns plugging their iPods in for one song at a time, though this leaves them all with a jarring musical discordance. Mako really, really likes music that sounds like broken machinery, and Chuck, bless his heart, has an inordinate fondness for 1980s hair metal.  
The car ride is uneventful until they pull off the highway.  
"Ah! Chuck, what did you do!"  
"Nothing! What are you talking about?"  
"Look, it won't play!"  
"You don't have it plugged in far enough, donkus," Chuck says.  
"Hey," Herc says.  
"Sorry!" Chuck says, but then adds, under his breath, "But it's true."  
"No, it _is_ plugged in! You did something to the cable!"  
"I did _not_! Look, see, it works fine--" but when Chuck goes to snatch the cable out of her hands, Mako doesn't release it.  
They start bickering again, with renewed vigor.  
Stacker pulls into a parking lot of a non-descript green building, with old trees throwing uneven pools of shade. He parks the Jeep beneath one of the trees.  
Chuck and Mako start a slap-boxing match the moment they exit the car. Mako is winning by virtue of being faster--until Chuck bear-hugs her and starts to muss her hair with his chin.  
Herc watches Stacker watch _them_ as they stumble down the footpath, and both men shake their heads in unison.  
They stop when they actually look up and see the building they're in front of.  
"An animal shelter? AN ANIMAL SHELTER!" Chuck says, and then he's practically vibrating with excitement.  
"ARE WE GETTING A DOG? OH MY GOD, DAD--STACKER--"  
"You don't have to shout," Stacker chuckles, indulgent and amused, and Chuck would _hug_ him, Herc knew, if he wasn't freshly seventeen and it wasn't against the Boy Rules.  
Mako sidles up to Stacker and slips her hand into his, grinning up at his face.  
He looks at her sideways, smirks and raises one eyebrow, and says, "I told you I wouldn't forget what you said."  
(There are bulldog puppies, and Chuck picks the smallest one with the chubbiest tummy. He names him Max and starts spoiling him with table-scraps, almost from day one.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Teenage bickering is really fun to write~


	3. Tea and Biscuits

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Herc and Stacker and hurt/comfort.  
> Also, vague hints of a plot rear their head!

"Where're the kids?" Stacker asks. He feels too tired to move, the headache flattening him into the mattress.

He hears Herc undressing, soft crisp sounds of fabric moving against fabric.  
"Don't think you'll like it too much if I tell you," Herc says, half-playfully, and Stacker closes his eyes, frowning.

Frowning hurts. The muscles in his face feel like they're a solid ache, from his temples down to his cheekbones. The back of his head feels like someone hit him with a brick, the pain from his temples radiating up into his scalp, down into the muscles of his neck. 

"That boy?" Stacker mutters.  
"Becket, yeah. Not as bad a kid as you'd think," Herc says.

Stacker makes a disgusted noise.  
"Is he driving her around in that rattling American deathtrap of a car?"  
"Aww, leave the kid and his car alone. Last I heard, him and Mako were fixin' it up."

Stacker opens his eyes at that, and actually sits up, wincing.  
"What's wrong with it that it needs fixing?" he demands.

Herc is smiling, shaking his head. He is down to his gray A-shirt and olive-colored boxers, his half-folded shirt in one hand. He's already thrown his pants over the back of one of the chairs; the shirt follows it. 

"Work was terribly dull," Herc says, "Paperwork. McKenzie asked after you."  
Stacker hums dully, fights the urge to slump backwards onto the mattress. He drops his forehead into one hand and sighs. His eyes close without him thinking about it.

"That bad, huh?" Herc says, when Stacker doesn't even comment on his obvious deflection. And then the mattress dips when he settles next to Stacker.  
"What," Stacker says, without opening his eyes.

Herc's fingers are callused, but the roughness is pleasant when he sinks his fingertips into the stiffened knot of muscle in the left side of his neck and gently kneads there.  
Stacker lets out the softest moan, and privately hopes Herc didn't hear it. He is vaguely embarrassed and thoroughly miserable.

The misery beats out the embarrassment, though, and Herc's hand is moving up the side of his neck, cupping the back of his head.

He lets Herc pull him over gently, until his head is on his husband's shoulder, and Herc's fingers are moving over his scalp.

"Did you take anything?" Herc murmurs. His voice a soft drawl in Stacker's ear.  
His hand doesn't stop moving, fingers travelling back down to the side of his neck to continue working at the muscle there.  
Stacker nods, swallowing. 

"How long ago?"  
"Just after breakfast," he says. He'd taken a prescription-strength painkiller that morning, and laid down. Now, though, he is in so much pain that walking--even just to the bathroom to fetch the pills--is not an option. Sitting up is enough that the pain feels like a red-hot weight is rolling around inside his skull. He is waiting for dinnertime to take two more, and prays that by then, it will taper off.  
He has no such faith.

The migraine shimmers just off the edge of his vision, making any real movement stiff with the vague threat of pain.

Stacker is very, very good at dealing with pain.  
Still, he hates this--hates having to hide like a kicked dog in his own house, lights off, blinds drawn, knowing that even the ceiling fan would be too loud, if he turned it on.  
He feels Herc's stubble against his temple, his lips on his forehead.

"Want to call the doc?"  
"What for?" Stacker says, and Herc sighs against his temple.  
"Why are you lying here in pain when you should be--"  
"...What should I be doing, Herc?"

"Whatever you want, besides lying here playing depressing music on tiny violins for yourself! You're hurting, there are ways to fix it. Let's get you some meds, maybe something so you can sleep through it..."  
Stacker makes a gruff, soft noise of assent.  
"...and I'll bring it up with tea and biscuits."  
At that, Stacker pulls away from him, frowning.  
"Herc. Please tell me you don't intend to bake."

Herc tries to look offended for all of two seconds--then looks shame-faced--then chuckles.

"Well, no. Think we have one of those tubes of fridge-cookie dough, though. Want some? I promise to read the temperature settings first."

Stacker smiles, silent, and drops his head back on Herc's shoulder. He nods, once.  
Herc gives him a kiss and shifts to stand up, when Stacker's hand on his stops him.  
"The biscuits..."

Herc gives him a quizzical look. "What about 'em?"  
"...what kind are they?" Stacker mumbles.  
Stacker Pentecost does not _mumble_. Herc would deny it to anyone who asked.  
"Er," he says, then, "Shortbread?"  
Stacker's face opens into a real, half-relieved smile. He squeezes Herc's hand and releases it.

Herc pulls a pair of jeans on and has his hand on the doorknob before Stacker speaks again.

"Don't think you got out of talking about the Becket boy and his car."  
Herc just laughs.  
"Of course not, Stacks. We can play Good Dad, Disappointed Dad with her when she gets home."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These fics really _are_ just a bunch of fluff ficlets very loosely bound together by the same continuity. I want to update more, but am not often in a place where I am able to update as often as I would like.  
>  Still, thank you very much for reading, and even more for commenting. :) It makes me tremendously happy to hear good things about my fics!


End file.
